Movie Piracy

by Editor
January 25, 2018 at 9:40 am

http://www.smartertimes.com/1582/movie-piracy

A regular feature in the Times involves the newspaper interviewing its own employees about their use of technology. The latest installment, with the Times "Andes bureau chief," Nicholas Casey, includes this passage:

Beyond your job, what tech product are you currently obsessed with using in your daily life?

Netflix. There seem to be 10 times more offerings in Latin America than the United States, including many movies that are blocked back home and that I can only rent on iTunes. I would urge anyone who wants to spend days watching good films not available in America to set his or her VPN to Colombia and have a look.

The reason those movies aren't available in America is that Netflix and the owners of the intellectual property rights of the movies haven't reached an agreement to make them available. The Netflix terms and conditions state "You may view Netflix content through the Netflix service primarily within the country in which you have established your account and only in geographic locations where we offer our service and have licensed such Netflix content." If American users are viewing content in the way that the Times "urges," they'll be depriving actors, actresses, screenwriters, directors, and other creative types of compensation for their labor. It's not precisely shoplifting or theft, but it's skating on pretty thin ice in the direction of deception. If the Times journalist and editors can't understand this, imagine that the Times itself had different digital subscription prices for readers in the U.S. and in Colombia, with the U.S. price being higher and the Colombia price being lower. And then imagine that Smartertimes urged America-based readers to subscribe to the Times via a VPN set to Colombia.

If people are doing this sort of thing, it seems like maybe the sort of thing that Times technology reporters might want to report on by contacting the companies and interest groups who have stakes in the matter and then providing an evenhanded, impartial account of the issues involved, rather than by "urging" readers to circumvent the geography-based content controls that are in place to protect content that people worked hard to create.

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